Echelon has been testing the waters of the Asian smart meter market with some key partnerships over the past few months. On Tuesday, it announced an expansion of that effort, with the launch of a new control module it will provide to partners serving China, South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia, aimed at expanding their reach from smart meters to a whole array of smart grid devices.

The idea is to give regional meter manufacturers a tool to hook their smart meters to devices like solar panels and battery inverters, grid sensors, plug-in vehicle chargers and other grid devices, all over Echelon’s grid networking and software infrastructure. Partners including Mitsubishi Electric Automation in Thailand, South Korea’s VIDCOM, Malaysia's Comintel, and existing partner China’s Holley Metering plan to use the technology, which will be available in the second half of 2012, Echelon reported.

It’s another step in the San Jose, Calif.-based company’s new strategy for making inroads into countries like China, India, Brazil and South Africa and other emerging smart grid markets in Latin America and Southeast Asia. These countries often have incumbent meter manufacturers that want to own future smart meter markets, and governments often impose mandates for local manufacturing.

That makes local partnerships essential for the big North American and European smart grid vendors trying to break into the next wave of smart grid deployments. The list of contenders includes the likes of Itron, Landis+Gyr, Elster, Trilliant and Silver Spring Networks, and of course the big four grid giants, Siemens, Schneider Electric, General Electric and ABB.

Right now, Echelon’s newly announced Asian partners are looking to use the technology to pull grid power sensor data from the smart meters themselves -- a function made a bit easier by Echelon’s use of power lines to carry data, which opens up the power signal for analysis.

Echelon has deployed tens of millions of PLC-connected smart meters in Europe, and has been vying with Landis+Gyr for top market share in the region. Its North American presence is currently limited to a single small meter deployment with Duke Energy in Cincinnati. But with U.S. smart meter deployments slowing down, and Europe’s smart meter deployment plans at risk from the continent’s ongoing economic crisis, the smart grid industry has been turning toward developing markets for future growth.

There’s no doubt that the rewards for contenders who can meet the market’s needs will be immense, however. China is going to need about 300 million smart meters over the next five years, according to government targets, and Brazil wants to deploy 65 million smart meters by the end of the decade.